A typical wireless network includes plurality of access points providing wireless access. There are a wide variety of network planning tools available for wireless network planning and design to create, based on requirements given by a user and information on a physical environment, network plans that indicate where to place access points, and possibly also how to configure the access points to provide wireless access fulfilling the requirements.
Network planning tools are configured to start from an initial network plan that defines access point positions and parameters for radios the access points contain, and to modify the network plan iteratively using at least one of an objective function estimating how good the plan is and/or a set of requirements for capacity and/or coverage that need to be fulfilled. When the set of requirements is used, the iterative modifying of the network plan continues until all the requirements in the set are fulfilled. When the objective function is used, the iterative modifying of the network plan continues until a better network plan, judged by the objective function, is not found. If both the set of requirements and the objective function are used, the iterative modifying of the network plan continues until a plan filling all the requirements in the set that is the best based on the objective function is found. However, the set of requirements does not take into account the environment, and in order to find the best plan within reasonable time, the objective functions used are rather simple and do not cover the exact positions of access points with enough detail to provide the optimum final positions of access points.
A position of each access point has a paramount importance for the operation and performance of a network, and a small change in an access point's position may have a huge impact, for the operation and performance. When deciding final positions of the access points signal propagation, interference, and obstacles, such as structures, and the like, affecting to signal propagation in an environment where the network is to be built, should be taken into account.